Bug Description

Now when you type in a Nautilus window, Nautilus immediately performs a search in the current directory and all its subdirectories. I personally find this annoying. If I want to search, I'll click the search icon. Often I'm looking at a long directory listing and simply want to jump to a certain point in it, and type-ahead find works great for that.

Thanks Adam, it's something that annoys quite some people indeed. We are not sure what to do at the moment, nautilus 3.6 is an user regression compared to 3.4 on several fronts.

We are discussing adding back nautilus 3.4 as an option (and maybe make it the default in Ubuntu) but it's an unmaintained software upstream and it doesn't seem to be a good idea to suggest it to users if we are not going to have the resources to fix issues with it...

I would say that this is a long way from Low Importance. As a desktop user I hit this bug dozens of times per day, and over time this is incredibly frustrating to the point of having installed several alternatives, and even considering dropping Unity/Gnome in favor of KDE (or something sane).

One more point. When the Nautilus designers replaced type-ahead find with search-as-you-type, their intention was that searching as you type would be really fast because Nautilus would use Tracker to search. See, for example, the comment https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=680118#c4 : "Nautilus will build with a Tracker dependency by default unless
--disable-tracker is used. That is strongly not recommended. Search is going to kind of suck without it."

Because Ubuntu does not use Tracker, searching as you type in Nautilus is especially painful on Ubuntu, and so the removal of type-ahead find affects Ubuntu users especially acutely.

So in Ubuntu we could enable Tracker, which would alleviate the problem somewhat, and/or patch type-ahead find back in. I lean toward the patch: it's probably really easy. But I agree with Alfredo that finding some solution to this should have more than a Low importance.

I also find the removal of type-ahead very frustrating. I think an option to re-enable it should be available.

In my opinion the previous behavior was more intuitive: if I wanted to search fo something I would have used the search function at hand. Before it was possible to discern the two things, (1) go to the file/folder in the current folder, (2) search for a file/folder in the current folders and subfolders. Now only option (2) is possible.

The new behavior is INFURIATING. And the search functionality is terrible. Even if it were fast (and it's terribly slow on my Core i7 and Intel SSD), it's stupid. I'm a software developer. When I type 'lib', I want to jump to the lib directory that I'm looking at--not find every directory and file with lib in it recursively. That's insane! And there's a well-established UX for this already: indicate that you want to perform a search by pressing Ctrl-F, F3, or whatever.

This change has made it virtually impossible to navigate Nautilus without a mouse, and so Nautilus is now completely useless to me. HUGE step backward.

I realize that GNOME is doing weird things with Nautilus 3.6, and that the version shipping with Ubuntu is a best effort by Canonical, the Ubuntu community, and friends to maintain sanity. I don't mean to criticize the folks who are doing the best they can. I just want adequately register my frustration here. My Ubuntu desktop experience is seriously hampered as Nautilus is completely useless to me now. It's much more efficient to do all file operations in a shell if I can't type-ahead find.

And I don't think this is an issue of, "Well, I guess it's time to learn new UI." I'm not averse to drastic changes to the UI if they're improvements. This isn't a matter of Old Dog v. New Trick. This is a very, very bad UI decision. It makes the software less useful.

Quick side rant: the GNOME team have been stripping out features and removing useful functionality for years. I understand the idea of boiling down a tool to its most essential parts, the benefits that that has for maintainability, and the elegance of a focused UI. But come on. It's easy to cross the line and break things that people rely on, and that seems to have been GNOME's modus operandi for at least the past 6 years.

I also agree on this. I used the lookahead as my primary navigation through complex filesystems. I have so many like-named subdirectories that this new feature is dropping my efficiency pretty badly. I was hoping to avoid using any of the cinnamon forks until/unless they became officially embraced by Ubuntu (just for compatibility reasons), but I'm a little stuck.

I +1 this. I've recently upgraded to 13.04 with nautilus 3.6 and this is the single most annoying thing at all. I quite like how most things are back to basics, but this is the complete opposite. Unless I want to make around for hours with the mouse and clinched eyes, this makes nautilus about as useful to me as a car with built in satnav that can only turn left. I would love to see a patch for this. As others mention, if I wanted to do this kind of search I would, well, search (Ctrl+F etc.).

Just wanted to agree with above, and show by posting that there are more frustrated users. This "feature" beats famous Win8 Start button. IMO it's worst "feature" ever designed, I'd love to see how developers of this software uses their file mangers. I can't understand why there is no way for users to configure this behavior. Even advanced users have no option to reconfigure. Why????

Installing an old nautilus is no option here. This is a really annoying, broken feature and should be reverted to the old behaviour. Starting to type lets you loose your overview of where you are in the file system. If I want to search, I press Ctrl+F. Then this search should be available.

Thanks for the interest/comments there, Ubuntu doesn't have a nautilus hacker though and that chance is coming from upstream, it would be better discussed on the upstream bug tracker/mailing list than on launchpad ... while we agree that the current situation is suboptimal not sure that's a problem that can easily by fixed by Ubuntu

Sebastien, thanks for your comment - it's nice to know that someone at Ubuntu is paying attention to this thread.

I don't think forking an old version of Nautilus is practical. The problem is that it would be a ton of work to keep such a fork compatible with new versions of GTK, GLib and other libraries. Instead I think the current version of Nautilus (3.8 in Saucy) should be patched to fix this.

Removing type-ahead find has been controversial upstream (i.e. at GNOME) - see, for example, the discussions at

Nevertheless I think it's very unlikely that the GNOME developers will fix this for 3.10, or possibly ever. Even if they were to fix this in, say, Nautilus 3.12 next spring, that version won't appear in Ubuntu until late 2014 (since Ubuntu lags GNOME by a release cycle). So if this going to be fixed in Ubuntu in the near future, I think Ubuntu will need to take responsibility for doing that. You may not like that - sure, in an ideal world this would be discussed rationally and fixed upstream - but this is how it is.

You wrote "not sure that's a problem that can easily by fixed by Ubuntu". I guess that depends on what you mean by "easily". I'm quite confident that a competent hacker could come up with a patch to the current Nautilus that restores type-ahead find in, say, 2-3 weeks. It might even be easier. I'd start by attempting to git revert the commit where this breakage was introduced:

That will yield merge conflicts, which must be studied and resolved in some nice way. This might not be solvable in a day, but I'd be very surprised if this took more than a month of work.

To those of us on the outside, it's baffling that Ubuntu would not want to invest that amount of effort to solve this, since this is a highly visible core program on the Ubuntu desktop and it seems pretty evident that the majority of users are harmed by this. Has someone at Ubuntu already spent several weeks working on this and concluded it was too difficult? Or does Ubuntu not feel it would be worth that amount of effort?

> Has someone at Ubuntu already spent several weeks working on this and concluded it was too difficult? Or does Ubuntu not feel it would be worth that amount of effort?

Well, neither, the current desktop team has around 10 people to maintain the desktop ... that includes the complete GNOME stack, xorg, firefox, libreoffice, etc.

In practice that's quite a low amonth of manpower compared to the number of packages to maintain, blocking time from an hacker for more than half a day is difficult for us... there is no way at the moment to spare someone for a week to resolve nautilus issues, we just have to sneak fixes in between higher priority work

Oh, for the record we do agree that this bug is annoying and would like to fix, we just need to deal with what we have

> If only 10 of them are assigned to desktop maintenance, I would say that team is seriously understaffed. But that's probably a discussion for another forum, not this bug thread. :)

Right ... note that we have more "desktop" people than that, but most of them are working on Unity and Ubuntu Touch ... which limits our capacity for issues on the "traditionnal desktop". But as you said, that's a discussion getting out of topic for this bug ;-)

It might be worth a try to directly contact the responsible devs and have a polite discussion wether this bug was marked "invalid" on a technical and comprehensible reason, considering design and consistency being a bad tradeoff for usability and freedom of choice.

If Gnome then still persist on the Apple pathway, how are the chances of getting a type ahead plugin working?

To add my voice to this bug, I installed 13.04 today, on my work computer (previously Windows 7 only), to enable me to use a variety of bash scripts to process a large number of files on an external ext3 drive. At home I have 12.10 installed.

The files are images, several thousand per folder, stored in dated folders (such as 11-04-23-country_location). Now I know, for example, that I was in Belgium in May 2005, so I type '05-05' and a folder NEAR the one I want was previously highlighted, allowing me to quickly and easily find the correct folder. A related task is to go to the next, and previous, folders. Both of these uses are broken with the new search set-up.

The Gnome team's total brick-walling of the furious users should give pause for thought. I simply cannot believe they have shot themselves in the foot so categorically as to make the staple piece of software, that underpins their entire user interface, so crippled.

This is a far more serious usability issue than anything thrown up with the migration to Unity. I would rate it, probably, as the highest, most disruptive user interface bug I have ever come across in Ubuntu (and I've been with you since Warty).

The workaround linked by M4he above is good news, but the idea of having to install a patch to get basic file-browser functionality is insane. Even more insane than firing up Mac OSX and being faced with the abomination that is Finder.

Sebastian, it's great news that Ubuntu are listening, and seeing this as an issue, and I hope a proper solution is forthcoming. At what point does a frankly bizarre upstream user interface decision like this become priority #1 at Canonical? When it begins to compromise the very good work being done with Unity? When does it become worth moving a developer from Unity onto an issue like this?

The attachment "enable_disable_recursive_search.patch" seems to be a patch. If it isn't, please remove the "patch" flag from the attachment, remove the "patch" tag, and if you are a member of the ~ubuntu-reviewers, unsubscribe the team.

[This is an automated message performed by a Launchpad user owned by ~brian-murray, for any issues please contact him.]

1. Of course, this patch does not restore type-ahead find as originally requested in this bug ticket. Instead, it simply disables recursive searching, so that as you type only files in the current directory are returned. Still, this does significantly ease the pain of this upstream change. If Ubuntu can't summon the resources to restore type-ahead find in 13.10, I would recommend landing this patch since it's ultra-simple and does make things less painful. I'd further recommend modifying the patch so that non-recursive search is the default (as it stands, the user must set a GSettings key to disable recursive search, and few users will figure out how to do that). The GSettings key would then let users *enable* recursive search if they really want to. I suspect that few users will.

2. You really should be patching Nautilus 3.8.2, which is the current version of Nautilus in Ubuntu 13.10, where this is most likely to land. (I wouldn't mind seeing this backported to 13.04 either, though.)

It's just insane that a bug that made people install alternative packages just to get rid of a tiny new feature is not considered a ultra-super-high priority on Ubuntu teams.

I'm using Ubuntu for years, and this is the most annoying thing I've ever noticed since Unity was introduced. At first, I found myself cursing Ubuntu for that sudden UI change, but Unity made its way and now I really like it. I don't think the same gonna happen with this damn search thing.

Nautilus browsing is just useless right now! I prefer "Ctrl+Alt+T", "cd to/a/path", and "nautilus .&" instead of touch my mouse or insanely arrow-navigate to do so. I would try to fix it myself if I knew C++ =/

Please, pleease call Mark to dev's room and ask him for a "Nautilus browsing experience". I'm sure it would hate Nautilus as we do right now.

Daniel, thanks for your continued work on this. I tried your branch and this seems like a step forward: most of the issues I mentioned above are fixed. I'm still seeing this issue from before, though:

- Select the first file in a directory, press the down arrow once, then type the first character of a filename. Notice that a secondary selection rectangle remains around the previously selected file. If you press Escape to exit the search, the secondary selection remains, and if you then press the down arrow Nautilus navigates to the file following it. Instead, as soon as the search begins the secondary selection should vanish, just like in Nautilus 3.4.

Actually it seems a bit better than last time around: the first time I type a filename in a given directory view, usually I don't see the secondary selection and the arrow keys behave as expected. But if you repeat the steps above over and over in the same directory view, you'll see that the secondary selection often appears, and arrow keys after Escape often navigate up or down from the secondary selection position, not from the filename you just navigated to. Do you see this too? Is this fixable?

If I understand what you're describing, it shouldn't really be possible.
isearch_start (called when you start typing a new search) calls isearch_entry_changed which unselects everything via nautilus_view_set_selection (slot->details->content_view, NULL);
Can you try something similar to the above procedures and see if it's still reproducible?

Daniel, thanks for your heroic efforts to reproduce the issue I described. I just followed your list of steps above with a fresh install of 14.04, fully updated. And I still see the bug!

To be clear, after your steps above:

9) Open a Nautilus window on your home directory.
10) Click the list view icon.
11) With the mouse, click on the Desktop directory (the first item in the list).
12) Type "t". The Templates directory will be selected.
13) Press Escape. Templates will still be selected.
14) Press the down arrow key. Documents (the second item in the list) will now be selected. This is unexpected: Videos should be selected at this time.
15) Type 't' again. Templates will be selected again, but a pale orange rectangle (i.e. the secondary selection) will still be visible around Documents, which is unexpected.
16) Press Escape again. The secondary selection rectangle will still be visible.
17) Press the down arrow again. Now Downloads will be selected, but Videos should be.

@Adam: we would like to get that feature back for the LTS for sure. I've some post-holiday back but that one is on my todolist, I'm likely going to get to it next week. It might be useful to open a new upstream report with the patch, I think some people said that upstream is open to take back some feature if they are off by default and opt-in through gsettings

It has worked well here over a couple of weeks & doesn't seem to add to an existing mem leak in list view.
I do wonder though how many users would find value in a preference's option that is only exposed in gsettings/dconf-editor vs. being available thru nautilus's preferences dialog.

Thanks Daniel, just to report, this worked fine against 3.8.2 in Debian unstable, I'm using it now and everything seems to work fine. And, please do take the patch upstream, even if it might seem frustrating to argue this case once more.

I navigate nautilus with typeahead, enter and backspace. Used to work wonderfully and was a good example of how the same interface can be usefull usefull for both power user and novice. Now that is completely broken.

This is not a performance problem (tracker/no tracker), it is a qualitative problem. Gnome new word order only works if you have globally unique names for files and directories.

Whenever developers shows lack of interest in use-case based "feature"-implementation, i just point them to this "bug". If the still don't get it, i'll tell them to open the "/usr/share/themes"-folder in Nautilus using just a keyboard. Most of them will just yell obscenities and set PCManFM or Thunar as their default file-manager.

Recursive search is a disaster implemented as a feature you can't opt out of. My personal opinion is that Nautilus should be dropped as default file manager in Ubuntu. I'll never trust that team again.

I might add that I'm personally not much affected by the "bug", since I use Midnight Commander. Thanks Peter Norton ;)

Thanks to the people fixing this bug, in the first place. However, I'm sorry to put it in this way but Blaster pointed out what is the real bug which caused this one. It is the strange policy in the Nautilus development. This might be fixed by changing the policy or changing the file manager in Ubuntu. Because otherwise, we must ask what will be next? Removal of Home (/home/user) from the side bar and leaving there only (My) Documents, (My) Music and (My) Pictures as it is on Mac OS and some (all?) MS Windows? Removal of possibility to show hidden (.*) files or removal of list view because everyone wants big thumbnail anyway, right? ...

I'm sorry to see developers spending their time reimplementing, debugging and fixing features which already had working implementations and were removed just few months before. I'm concerned that this state is not sustainable.

Daniel, I believe you should now be awarded the Bountysource bounty for this bug. It hasn't closed yet (probably because this bug still points to an open GNOME issue that is only semi-related), but I just emailed them asking to close the bounty. They're usually pretty responsive so I expect to hear back soon. In any case I expect we can resolve this with them directly. Thanks again for your help fixing this!

I totally second comments #90 and #91
This bug demonstrates (if any more proof was needed) that Nautilus needs to be replaced with something else by default in Ubuntu (and in any distro trying to be of any use), quite urgently.

Jumping to the file beginning with the typed letter is NOT the best behavior.

Searching all the folders and subfolders when something is typed is also not the best behavior.

THE BEST BEHAVIOR IS:

Searching all the folders and subfolders when something is typed is the best behavior given a toggle button to enable/disable subfolder search. If subfolder search is disabled only current folder will be searched. This amalgamates best feature of both sides.

@Ajay: That's a rather subjective opinion! Search will always get slow on huge folders. Because of the technical nature of type-ahead it is still fast even on huge folder contents. When I use type-ahead it takes me less than 1 second to choose and enter a folder.
I know my folders and their subfolders, I'm dependent on the speed of type-ahead because I use a chain of multiple letter and enter key strokes to navigate through many folders in a second. If type-ahead would be replaced by search, the speed of search results would depend on the folder's content size and I would not be able to use my quick chain of key strokes anymore due to the irregular response time of the search.
I admit, this is a rather subjective opinion as well! But type-ahead has been there for years, it is also integrated into the file managers of OS X or Windows and into the majority of the Linux ones. Your solution mentioned might be an improvement for _some_ people. But that doesn't mean it should replace type-ahead. It could be added as an optional feature that can be activated within the settings. Linux software in general is about configuration & customization - not about claiming you know what is best by forcing your opinion on others and killing features. The latter is exactly what happened to nautilus and why we have this long discussion here.